


Don't dare to claim this as mine (it was for you every time)

by Kara_luna



Series: A Song of Fuck You, Everyone Gets a Happy Ending Because I Said So [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dark, Dark Jon Snow, Gen, Jon Snow Lives, Jon Snow is a Targaryen, Jon is pissed, M/M, Robb Stark Lives, Robb Stark is King in the North
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25776277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kara_luna/pseuds/Kara_luna
Summary: Jon Snow knows his name. Knows his past, his blood, his place.And it is not in Winterfell.He's not a wolf, never has been, not a brother, not anymore, and he's not the man Robb Stark is trying to drag home, not ever again. He's changed, with scales over his heart and fangs full of fire not ice, he is not his mother or his father, he's something else entirely.A song of ice and fire.And he's the hero with a golden heart, a perfect moral compass, understanding in spades... But he's also a little boy that's been wronged a hundred thousand different times. And it burns, like a wildfire in his stomach, it burns, harsh and hot and all consuming, it burns, because he's angry like he's never been before.And when a dragon rages, the kingdom burns, because when you break someone, it doesn't make them the perfect, selfless hero.It just makes them broken.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Robb Stark, basically this is pre- the relationship, implied and something that happens after this
Series: A Song of Fuck You, Everyone Gets a Happy Ending Because I Said So [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1798237
Comments: 9
Kudos: 134





	Don't dare to claim this as mine (it was for you every time)

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so Jon is pissed off at everyone in this. I'm not saying he's justified, I'm not saying he's NOT justified, I'm saying he's angry. And why shouldn't he be? Whether it's rational or not, we get angry sometimes and for some reason that never happened in the tv show. People did a ton of shit to jon that negatively impacted him and I just wanted to look at this in a different way. A what if or sorts. In this world, Jon is angered by how Robb thinks he can just decide his fate for him, instead of endeared by it. And the neglect as a child, because honestly that was pretty neglectful for him and some of the other stark siblings too, actually impacts him in a bad way when he's older. He has issues with self esteem, finding a purpose and place in the world, and feeling happy and content just as much as finding a way to love and be loved. He's damaged, and when your broken, that’s all you are. It doesn’t automatically make you the benevolent hero, it just makes you hurt. 
> 
> And Jon’s never been allowed to just be hurt.

Jon Snow has been a sworn brother for a year when he grasps a lantern and launches it at an other, and does not burn. 

Jon Snow has been a crow for a year and a half when he falls in love with a wilding, and she is murdered. 

Jon has been the Lord commander for one day when he finds Aemon Targeryen’s withered accounts, and he realizes what he is. 

Jon has been dead and brought back to life and given up his role as Lord commander to Allister Thorne to work as weapon trainer to the new recruits for two years when he sees the banners of Stark wolves in the distance, and he nearly breaks his hand punching a wall. 

The cold is biting and the newest recruits shiver in their boiled leather, still so unused to the vicious winds of the wall. Young Dravor drops his sword three times, too focused on pulling his furs closer to actually fight his superior. The other boys hardly fare better against the straw dummies set up along the courtyard, the small number of rapists, thieves, and criminals they were able to drag North, having meager, if any, skills in combat and low tolerance for hard work or discipline. 

Thorne watches disdainfully from the stairs and his “brothers” spit at his shoes when his back is turned, grumbling and swearing, and there is little respect not achieved by fear in regards to an unholy creature who can survive death itself, but there’s a contentment in Jon’s chest. 

He’s forgone his cloak and furs, striding around the courtyard in only his leathers and armor, hardly bothered by the cold, now that his fire laced blood has truly been awakened. He’s lost the few friends he’d once made, Samwell dying long ago in the failed rebellion at craster’s keep, Grenn earning himself a dagger to the throat for his support of Jon during the not so failed rebellion at Castle Black, and Pyp- Well that’s a memory he rather let cloud with time and ale. 

Yet. He has a purpose here, among all these untrained men who lack discipline or honor, among all these recruits who need him, even if they despise that they do and are still unable to acknowledge it. ‘Tis his responsibility to train them on how to stay alive in the Northern snows beyond the wall, how to defend themselves against the monsters who lurk in the dark and the cold. 

He’s finally found his place, his purpose, his path. He knows who he is, who fathered and mothered him, and he knows to not wish for glory or titles, for he will never receive them regardless, but to treasure his own small niche in the world. To be content as one tiny cog in a great, big machine. 

It took years and it took pain and it took grief, and anger, and hatred… But he’s accepted what he is and what his fate is to be. Accepted his mother is dead and gone and unreachable, that his father is not the monster the world painted him to be, only irresponsible and naive and foolish. Accepted his great-great-uncle died before he even had a chance to know he still had family in this world, that his real half siblings were butchered and slain before his birth. 

Accepted that his mother and father are the reason poor, innocent, gentle Elia Martell was raped and murdered as she watched the horror that was her children’s deaths. 

He accepted a lot, in his cold, lumpy cot during his nights counting the cobblestones that make up the ceiling, left with nothing but his thoughts and anticipation for the nightmares lying in wait behind his sagging eyelids. 

Standing on thick, slippery ice promising death for any missteps and watching the world below him as rangers reenter the castle, like ants returning to their anthive, breathing the crisp air full of stories and fantasy and chilling life, he can accept so much. 

But what his uncle’s done? What his uncle’s  _ wife _ has? 

He cannot just swallow down all they’ve put him through and ignore the pain and the hurt and the loneliness they’ve wrought on him since the moment he opened his eyes. He never expected Lady Stark to love him, never held it against her that she didn’t, but to sit over his almost death bed and confess while she was so certain he could not hear her… 

The memory is decades old yet still fresh in his mind, as if he could close his eyes and awaken in that same sick bed like he did the morning the fever broke, just a little boy who had seen nothing of the world’s horrors, nothing of the death dogging at the heels of all who inhabit it. 

_ Please, please, to the mother, to the crone, to the maiden, to the father, to the stranger, to the smith, to the warrior. Please, let him live. Let him live and I’ll be a mother to him. Let him live and I’ll love him. Those wishes, those wishes for this, for his death, they were folly, please just let him live. _

Those words got him through his childhood, through his years as a growing child who had no mother to explain why hair was sprouting along his stomach and chest, or why he had mood swings like nothing he’d ever experienced before, why he looked as he did at his- 

Because she did not love him, she was not a mother, she did not keep her promise, but she still made it. She still sat at his bedside and wished him to wake, and for a little boy who had only ever watched in envy as those around him were loved and cherished, that was enough. 

But as a man grown? As a man who looked, not at her pleading for his life, but at her confessions and her shame? He could see it for what it truly was. 

Not a woman who felt guilt because an innocent child was going to die by her prayers, but a spiteful lady who cared only for her own conscience. If she hadn’t prayed for his death and he’d perished, it would have been alone in a big cold room, with no one and nothing to ease the pain and the fear. 

He would have died without ever having someone brush back his curls or sit by his bedside to wash away the sweat from his brow, and there would not be one person in all the world who would care. 

Robb had Theon, he had a title, friends, a future- It would have hurt for a little while, maybe even haunted him in the way the flayed man and the others haunt children when they’re young and impressionable, but he would have grown and left behind those memories of a little boy with raven hair and a solemn frown, with the rest of his boyhood. 

Arya was so young she probably would have noted his absence for a solid three minutes before losing interest and forgetting all about that brooding boy who used to sit with her brother and lock steel in the courtyard while she had her lessons. 

Sansa? Well she would probably just be happy her mother could finally smile without a weight constantly curving down her lips and deepening the lines of displeasure by her mouth and eyes. 

His uncle may have cared, but how much could he have really? If Jon hadn’t been Lyanna’s child, but Elia’s- well. History already tells the story of what his fate would have been doesn’t it? He never loved his nephew, not really. It was guilt and misplaced fear that Jon would become just like his mother, gone before his time with nothing but a crown of blue roses and blood encrusted sheets for his uncle to find. 

Jon was his responsibility, his burden, his debt to Lyanna, not his loved one. Not his child. Not  _ his _ . Jon was simply the last thing he had of his sister, and it was to her that his uncle gifted a hot blooded, speckled sandstead when he was seven and much rathered the well mannered and docile Fjord mares. Lyanna was the one his uncle gave a beautiful bow of bone and wildling carvings when Jon was nine and wanted a harp more than anything. 

She was the one who was presented with charcoal and paints for sketches and portraits the day Jon turned ten and disappointedly took his dreams of writing stories and crafting fairytales, and stuffed it to the farthest corner of his mind where all his dreams and hopes and wants went to die. 

Because Jon was invisible to the people of Winterfell.

Because Jon was a glowing red beacon to Lady Catelyn Stark. 

Because Jon was a shiny, pretty toy to the Stark children. 

Because Jon was a woman with winter in her skin and a storm in her eyes, wildness like a savage wolf running through her veins, and a winter’s fury in her black curls, to Lord Eddard Stark. 

Because Jon Snow was a dragon in wolf’s skin, fire in his breath and scales over his heart, and he would never be enough to people who never wanted the real  _ him, _ to begin with. 

And that anger, that hatred, it festered and it grew and it howled with the wildness that his uncle was always searching for in him.  **I’m finally like her, uncle. Are you happy? You finally awoken that wolf’s blood within me, despite the dragon venom flowing along with it, you’ve finally made me as vicious as she once was. Are you happy now?**

But  _ he’s _ happy, or at least as close to happy as he’ll ever be with Sam’s teary eyes and Gren’s lifeless corpse, and whatever was left of Pyp still laying in wait for him the moment his eyelids close. When Ygritte’s bloodless face greets him in the darkness every night, every second, every blink. 

He’s content, and that’s enough. 

Because Jon is the man who trains the recruits and demonstrates how to swing a sword and teaches men to aim a bow in seconds, to the people of Castle Black. 

Because Jon is just another sworn brother, another crow, another man in a sea of black furs and boiled leather, to the people of Castle Black. 

(Bastard, whore’s son, prince, king, commander, lordling, Ned’s son, boy, half brother, mistake)

Because Jon is just Jon to the people of Castle Black, and fuck- that’s all he’s ever wanted to be. 

He’s fixing Jarrik’s awful stance as the young man, more of a boy really, struggles to hold up the dented practice sword, let alone swing it properly at the straw dummy, when a horn blasts once in the distance. 

He straightens, absently patting the nervous boy on the back, focus already on the unplanned riders approaching the castle. His suspicions are confirmed when he glances up and Thorne is gone from his perch, obviously doing whatever it is his duties demand of him referring to whoever is outside their gates. 

“Alright, training’s finished for now. All of you head for the barracks unless told otherwise by myself or the Lord Commander, understood?” 

He gets grumbling from the majority of the men as well as a crooked salute from Jarrick and an awkward bow from Darin, but there’s also a few grunts of “Yes sir” and “Aye Snow.” It’s an improvement at least. At the start there had been no responses other than muffled curses and mocking “Yes m’lord.”

The men are far from anything even remotely resembling respectful, but they’re learning. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as the saying goes. The humbling experience of being knocked on your arse for hours on end by the same man, helps to build some kind of discipline, Jon’s found. 

The guards are preparing to lift the gate and there’s men running around and emerging from their stations to peak over the wall or out windows at the commotion happening outside. It’s very likely that one of the ranging expeditions simply made it back early or ran into issues and sent ahead a rider to acquire aid, it wouldn’t be the first time either. 

Jon runs a hand through his hair watching them run around like mice, vaguely amused by the scared excitement on some of the newer men’s faces, as if they believe something interesting is finally happening. 

He makes his way through the now abandoned yard, dropping his sword by the heap the men have already made, flinching slightly at the awful steel scraping on steel noise it makes. He’ll need to remember to sharpen and clean them before training on the ‘morrow, adding that to the tally of other responsibilities he still needs to finish before night falls, even with the early ending to training. 

He’ll need to check on the number of arrows left in stock, especially after multiple ranging expeditions had just left days ago with a fair share of them, speak to the smith about those cracked shields from sparring yesterday, the oiling of the lift’s gears, and then there was all the other chores Thorne had been dumping on him almost since he gave up the position of Lord Commander…

And of course Ghost would be needing a proper grooming and shearing given how unruly his fur’s gotten since his last few excursions beyond the wall to hunt and eat his fill of real meat rather than the grey lumps found in the cook’s signature stew…

He sighs, stopping in the hall for a moment. Rubbing a hand over his eyes, the exhaustion really hits him. There’s always so much to do and so much to finish and perfect and fix… Sometimes Jon actually finds himself missing his time beyond the wall. Not living among the free folk, that was something he’s missed almost constantly since the freedom of it was stripped from him, but the emptiness of his journey before then. 

Before they encountered Ygritte, before craster, before the uprising, when there was nothing but snow stretching in every direction and his mind was focused on only the steps in front of him, the tracks behind him, the brother’s surrounding him, the white that clouded his vision, and the single minded goal of warmth. 

Life was simple then. 

There was no beheadings in King’s landing, no wars for independence, no reveals of his heritage, no anger brewing in his gut, only growing larger and stronger and burning brighter and brighter every moment and every second-

Life was so very simple back then. 

So no, Jon is not overjoyed when he finally makes it to his chambers, still thinking over how to organize his growing list of duties, finally greets his wolf for the first time in nearly a fortnight that the beast has been hunting beyond the wall, finally sees ghost and runs a hand through that thick, white fur stained red and brown from blood at his muzzle- 

And a messenger nearly runs into his doorframe in his rush to get to him. The boy doubles over as if he hasn’t taken a breath since Thorne sent him, and Jon has half a mind to think the commander is just that terrifying, before sputtering out his message. 

“The Lord- The Lord Commander-” He pauses, still gulping down air as if he’s dying. “He wants you in his study immediately.”

Glancing at his one and only companion, he rolls his eyes at Thorne’s dramatics. “Well boy, it seems as if the commander’s not content to give us a moment of rest, huh?” He asks his wolf sardonically. 

Ghost cocks his head as if he understands, nudging his master as if to say, “well? Are you going or not?” He nods briefly at the steward, tiredly starting the trek to the Lord Commander’s chambers. 

Jon is not overjoyed when he enters and Thorne is glaring him down from the other side of his desk as if trying to set him on fire with only his gaze.  **Ha, jokes on him, it wouldn’t be the first time someone tried that and realized I can’t burn.**

“Lord commander?”

Thorne merely sneers at the title as if it coming from Jon’s mouth somehow taints it’s value and meaning despite the fact he spoke with no inflection. 

“Well, lord snow, it seems as though you continue to be above us mere brothers of the night watch.” He spits, tossing a missive across the desk. Jon doesn’t take the seat before him, fully aware it’s meant for people Allister Thorne at least tolerates, but he does step forward to receive the scroll of paper. 

Jon’s brows crinkle in confusion at the way the commander is scowling as if Jon has done something to once again question his authority or threaten his rank. In fact, his comments remind Jon of how he was treated by pretty much everyone when he first came to the wall, still an untested, arrogant little boy who thought himself far better from his sworn brothers. But it’s been years, long hard years, since Jon acted in such a way. 

In fact, giving up his position and choosing to be weapon’s trainer instead, did nothing but cement his dedication to the Night’s watch and his desire to serve as an equal, rather than superior or as the other men’s better. 

The seal his thumb brushes over shows the proud sigil of House stark in broken wax, and a shiver of dread races down his spine. Glancing up, it’s clear that Thorne’s waiting to see Jon’s reaction to whatever the missive says and that’s already sending red flags vigorously waving in his mind. 

Jon reads the letter. 

Jon reads the letter and it’s like that moment four years ago. The exact moment when Jon stood in the brisk, Northern winds and allowed his mind to wander and run and dance freely with the leaves and snow twirling past him. The exact moment when the thought came to him, crushing and true and heartbreaking. 

_ Those wishes, those wishes for this, for his death, they were folly, please just let him live. _

The exact moment the truth viciously murdered and buried the last of Jon’s hope for anything resembling a mother. When all those stupid little dreams and wishes and wants that he’d stored so meticulously and carefully in that dark portion of his mind, storing them for another day, another time when he could finally allow himself to desire something, were finally torn out like burrs on a horse. 

Torn out and destroyed like the leeches they were, sucking away at any contentedness or joy he could find in the cruel, twisted world he’s been born into. 

That feeling of everything being ripped from him, of everything that’s kept him moving forward, that’s kept him standing through all the pain and loneliness and the grief- being stripped away from him, leaving him empty and alone and cold as a corpse. 

_ By order of the King.  _

And the raging fire in his belly roars like the dragon he can never allow himself to be, rearing it’s head and screaming it’s rage. Jon doesn’t have to raise his eyes from the ink to know of the smirk Thorne has stretched across his face. 

To know the smug glee in his eyes at personally getting to see Jon loose everything and gain nothing for his trouble but more of the same shit he’s been given since the day he came wailing into the world from his mother’s corpse, from the blood of Elia and her children, from the bones of whores and wenches who were raped and butchered as the rebellion raged and men who never returned home and Catelyn Stark who held the burden of her husband’s wandering on her shoulders for almost the entirety of their marriage. 

The world isn’t fair, never has been, but there’s a part of Jon who personally believes it holds a special kind of hatred for him in particular. He, who was born out of so much death and horror and cruelty, who only lived because thousands of others did not. That this is the universe taking it’s dues, punishing his mother and father even after their deaths in the only way it can, now that they reside beyond its reach. 

They may be shielded, protected by the gates of the stranger and his ironclad rule, but Jon is not. Jon is all alone and the universe will take it’s penance, no matter how many children it must punish for their parent’s crimes. 

“The King’s troops have arrived. One hundred men, sixty horses, thirty wagons of grain, and seven of steel, bows, and leather. You’ve been paid for, Lord Snow. Better prepare your things, the King will be coming for you soon.”

Jon can hardly hear his slimy voice over the blood rushing in his ears. He nods mutely, taking the letter with him out the door. The stone under his feet is calming in it’s redundancy, thump, thump, thump, every step is another thump and every stone is the same mottled grey with chips and divots carved in by years of use and service. 

Just breath, he repeats over and over in his head, just breath. The king is coming for him, Jon understands what that means, what that means for his future. But when he makes it back to his room, he does not touch his things hidden beneath his cot. 

His personal belongings are meager, even less than the few bobbles he owned in his boyhood, just as a man of the night's watch should have. But he does not touch them. It would take him a moment to collect them into a small sack, only a few minutes to walk to the courtyard and request an escort to Winterfell from one of the men sent to the wall. 

But he sits on his cot and Jon Snow does not touch them. 

Ghost seems to sense something is wrong, uncurling himself from the corner of the room and padding forward to rest his large head awkwardly onto Jon’s lap where it no longer fits. He whines when his master hardly responds nor acknowledges him, barely in the headspace to even recognize the world around him, far too caught up in the storming torrent that is his mind. 

The dragon is roaring and stamping and raging in his stomach and there’s ice flowing through his veins, sharp and cold and unforgiving, and Jon can not find it in himself to move from his seat. He cards his fingers through the white fur of his last and only friend left in this wasteland of broken promises and stolen joy, and he gazes out the window at the snow in utter silence. 

Robb wants him to come home. 

Jon raises from the bed to punch the wall behind him as hard as he can. The pain shoots up his arm in waves, and his bones, surprising, don’t break as he expected them to. 

He sits back down on the cot. 

Jon wants to break his fist on  _ his graces  _ face, wants to scream that he has no home but the wall and it’s frigid cots with a solitary blanket and no pillows and it’s courtyard of rusty, dented swords, and the wall itself with nothing but it’s icy solitude high above the men and sorrows and fears of living. Wants to scream until his voice is hoarse and his lips crack, of what Eddard has done, of what the most honorable man in Westeros has done!

Jon sits idly by on his cot as yells and shouts come from down below where men are no doubt negotiating living arrangements and breaking in the new troops, catching them up on the way Castle Black works, and scheduling who will take their vows when. There’s rushing about and scuffling coming from the direction of the courtyard and he’s fairly certain there’s absolute confusion among the soldiers as they struggle to do the jobs that were usually handled by himself and, on occasion, Thorne. 

Jon doesn’t give a shit any more. 

He let’s out a bitter, defeated laugh. Ghost perks up, staring at him as if trying to figure out the strange fleshy creature in front of him and what the sound he just made, means in the language of wolves. His red eyes bore into Jon, glaring into his very center in a way that once unnerved him when faced with it from the faces of people like his uncle and aunt, Thorne and Mormant, Ygritte and Mance, as if trying to discover what made him work the way he did. As if trying to discover what it is that makes his heart beat a certain rhythm. 

But it doesn’t unnerve him now. It saddens him, because as intelligent as ghost has always been, he simply cannot understand the emotions of a man who can’t even understand them himself. And how can you save someone who doesn’t hold his hand out to be pulled from the ledge?

How can you save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

Jon goes to bed that day while the sun still hangs in the sky, glowing red and fiery like the moon set a flame, and the blue tinted by clouds is yet to be bruised by the dusk. He lists every responsibility, every duty, every chore that is his and his alone and there’s an awful possessiveness gnawing at his throat as he tries to breath knowing that those are no longer his. 

Not after tonight. 

Thorne will hand off his duties, his chores, his responsibilities to someone else and just like that, his niche in the world, his etching in the wall, his square of the quilt, will be gashed from the portrait of lives it once occupied a portion of. Once again, he will be thrown into a world that has never had a place for him, no matter how much he tried to carve out a space for himself. 

Jon falls asleep and dreams not of the endless blood soaked snow of what was once the free folk’s camps, nor the begging of a tarly boy who was far too young and far too talented in the ways of a future maester. There’s not even the red of a woman’s braid flowing in the wind as she throws her head back and breathes, or the tightened, wax flesh of a man who once shared his meals and sparred steel with steel alongside him in the courtyard. 

Tonight, a man bleeds rubies and weeps sapphire into a river of corpses and banners. A woman’s laughing, loud and bright as another screams for mercy, begs for death. The sickening suck of flesh when a sword is torn out of someone’s innards and skin accompanied by the shattering of bone and a man’s voice bellowing jovially for more wine. The next morning, Jon awakens to the first rays of light cresting the horizon with the praying of a woman ringing in his ears and her name fleeing his lips before it can be spoken. 

Jon spends the next three days on the wall, hidden in a dark corner where no messenger will find him. He’s so used to the cold and hard jerky used for rangers in the wilderness, that Jon has no issue spending his days on the snow capped ice that shields him from the world he has no intention of easily allowing back in. 

It takes three days for Thorne to realize something’s wrong. 

Jon sits and watches the clouds shift through the sky, wrapped in furs for hours just staring at the grey puffs swirling in different shapes and patterns. He’s certain ghost, somehow sensing what Jon’s planning because he’s always had the uncanny ability to do so, has already slunk back into the frozen tundra of free folk land laid out before him. 

Jon may not be the commander anymore, but he’s always been fast to pick up what he puts his mind to, and the patrol assignments, jobs, duties, all of it is known to him front and back. Thorne was arrogant, assuming Jon was the same green boy he was the day they first met. 

Assuming Jon was the same boy who quivered in excitement at the mention of his uncle and nearly wet his knickers in pride everytime Winterfell was mentioned. 

That was his first mistake. His second was allowing Jon to leave his study without an escort. His third was not having anyone on the watch for Jon attempting to knick food from the kitchens or storage rooms. 

Of course, that was what he planned on, Thorne was so completely predictable in the way that Jon had once been and now pretends to still be. But he is not a wolf, not anymore, and they should have realized the fangs of a dragon are very very different than that of a dog. 

The second day on the wall, Jon still hasn’t even gotten close to being caught, hidden away in the hardly patrolled crater that he is, and by midday he is able to make out a commotion happening below him. 

It seems the king has finally sent his servants to drag his “wayward brother home.” Jon allows himself a smirk at the thought. How disappointed he’ll be when he realizes that his precious “brother” is nowhere to be found. How distraught the poor lad will be when he’s informed that the great Lord Commander Allister Thorne has lost the most important sworn brother he has in his castle without a clue to where he’s gone. 

The vindictive pleasure is the only thing keeping the creature coiling in his stomach at bay, and the only thing keeping away the dread of inevitability. Afterall, it’s only a matter of time before he’s found or forced down from his position by the lack of food and water he’s thus far avoided. 

It’s inevitable, but Jon is Lyanna Stark’s son. He’s the son of a woman who threatened a group of knights with her title when they harmed a cragonmen who they thought weak and pathetic, and then dressed up as the knight of the laughing tree just to hammer in the point to them even further, and utterly humiliate them by besting them as a woman. 

If there is anything Jon has inherited from his mother, it is absolutely her retaliatory streak. He’s always given as bad as he got when able, but how do you fight back against a king? Against your lord commander? 

He found a way, and hopefully it makes very clear just how he feels about the whole arrangement. How he feels about his “brother.”

On the fourth day, Jon relents in the dead of night. He slips by the half asleep guards and the ones openly snoring easily enough, riding the lift down to the ground without anyone realizing something is amiss. 

Honestly, if Jon was still a sworn brother, he would probably have done something about the lax security. As of his new position, he’s thankful for it. He sticks to the shadows in case there’s anyone remotely vigilant on watch that particular night and makes it back to his room without incident. 

Somehow, miraculously, Ghost is resting by the foot of his cot when he enters. But of course he thinks amusedly, of course he would already be here when he left his frozen perch. No doubt the huge animal’s presence returning either early that day or yesterday was the only reason there were no search parties sent out or thorough searches of the castle and grounds conducted by the king’s men. 

The king’s familiar enough with the connection starks and their direwolves have, to know that Ghost would leave to hunt occasionally but would always return to his master after a few days.  **As soon as my wolf returned, the castle probably became lax because they realized that his return meant that I was still within the grounds or nearby,** Jon contemplated **.**

**Well,** laying back he propped his head up under his arm,  **now I suppose I can do nothing but wait.** Jon fell asleep gazing at the moon that happened to be full and round in the darkened, starless sky. 

>>>>>>>

The following morning Jon wakes to find a guard stationed at his door. The man glares hatefully at him when he passes by, as if it was by Jon’s hand that he was assigned to stand there through the night. He spends the day in the godswoods because it’s the only place completely abandoned by the other men. 

Jon gazes at the bloody face carved into bone white bark and feels none of the peace he should. Another man gazed at this same trunk, the day he branded a prince a bastard and cemented him into a life of questions and restlessness and solitude. 

A woman was wed to her husband under these same red leaves the day she forsook her family in a bloody war that robbed her brother of all he loved. 

This is the tree that birthed a bastard.

And it will be burned by a prince. 


End file.
